Japan by train

We moved around a lot by train during these months in Japan.

What I knew before was that Japanese trains are many, always on time, sometimes aesthetically curious.

I found out that trains are a big piece of this society: more than a means of transportation, they seem to be an element of aggregation. They have names of their own.

There are many of them and everywhere: by train you get at least close to anywhere. They are quiet, inside: if it is lunchtime, several people eat and, if they are in a group, chat; otherwise, an unforced, cooperative silence usually reigns, I would say.

Simplifying the taxonomy, there are three categories of trains here. There are, for many years now, the bullet trains, the shinkansen, which branch off from the central stations of the big cities and cover Japan in the time of a sleep or so: they are tapered, have long, sculpted snouts, muscular like mechanical animals made specifically to pierce the wind: when they first arrive at the platform, it looks like the slow-motion scene of a silent movie. At the opposite end of the spectrum are the local trains: they are one or two carriages, traveling on single-track lines, climbing and piercing forests where you are sure that Totoro is waiting at the station. And then there are the others, many, many trains: they have their own names and dedicated Wikipedia pages: they are convenient, sometimes very convenient, they have names from which you can sense that, besides utility, there is a matter of affection involved.

From the window, too often for it to be an accident, you happen to see people standing still, their cameras mounted on tripods, ready to snap when the train enters the frame. Trainspotter, Anglophones would perhaps call them, but that movie has long occupied that semantic space, along with a large chunk of the collective imagination, and, then, maybe those are just people who like watching trains.

They make level crossings, these trains that ply Japan in every direction-they make a lot of them, for me, used to living in places where level crossings are an endangered species.